Discouraging but insightful.
Books on the increasingly pugnacious Vladimir Putin, seemingly Russia’s president for as long as he wants, are not in short supply, but this short, shrewd analysis stands out.
“Not since the days of Reagan,” writes New Left Review editorial board member Wood, “has Russia seemed so central to US political life—and not since the depths of the Cold War has it been so unambiguously assumed across most of the political spectrum that Russia is the United States’ principal enemy.” There is less there than meets the eye, according to the author, who maintains that Putin is simply carrying on the policies of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Leaving the KGB in 1991, Putin made his reputation as a hardworking, absolutely loyal functionary. As designated successor in 2000, his first decree granted Yeltsin lifelong immunity from prosecution. Drunken and unpopular, Yeltsin was an easy act to follow, but Putin had a stroke of luck. Oil prices, the major source of government income, reversed their decline, allowing much of the population its first taste of prosperity. No more liberal than his predecessor but more efficient, Putin brought the media under government control, hobbled rival political parties without eliminating elections, and converted Russia into the “imitation democracy” that Western observers deplore. Few influential Russians, Putin included, pine for the old Soviet Union. The sole exception is its superpower status, whose loss rankles, and Wood believes that America’s greatest mistake was rubbing their nose in it by expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and meddling in areas like Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s backyard. The amenable Yeltsin complained bitterly, and Putin’s push back—e.g., the annexation of Crimea—was popular at home. Wood concludes that Putin has no great ambition except to stay in power and that successors will demonstrate the same patriotic fervor and deal with the same internal problems and dependence on oil prices that vex Putin.
Discouraging but insightful.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78873-124-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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